Arnold Toynbee read Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a young historian at the University of London and had the same reaction I did when I first read Hemingway. It blew his mind. He found it both exhilarating and dismaying. Exhilarating because of its historical insights, dismaying for it ...
Let’s start 2010 right and mention a few honest people in the news… I wrote this sentence a couple of hours ago, not realizing how difficult it was going to be to find even one honest boldfaced name. Like old Diogenes, I am still looking as my deadline nears. Which reminds me: The ...
Historically, at least in America, people who seek to thrive in the theatre, publishing, finance, media, or even the gossip columns, make their way to Manhattan. Once here, the climb begins, and it’s tougher than any mountain in Nepal. As E.B. White, the great Big Bagel chronicler wrote, “all ...
A recent article in a glossy magazine about the rich and famous mentioned a $35 million house in Malibu, California, whose neighbors include the actor Mel Gibson and the singer Britney Spears. The owner of this mega-monument to good taste and inconspicuous consumption turns out to be one Teodor ...
The hysteria over Tiger Woods is simply wonderful. Unlike Bill Clinton’s tarts, Tiger’s are a tiny bit better quality, which is not saying much. The prettiest of the lot, Rachel Uchitel, is something else. This is hard for me to admit, but she was at school with my daughter and I had ...
When the Marx Brothers announced in 1946 that their upcoming film was called A Night in Casablanca, Warner Bros threatened to sue for breach of copyright. Warner had produced the great hit “Casablanca” four years earlier, and insisted the funny men were trying to cash in on it. But Groucho was ...
The fourth and last time I debated at the Oxford Union was three or four years ago, and it was a total disaster. The motion was that Katrina’s aftermath was Bush’s fault, and I was against it. A quarter of a century before that, Auberon Waugh and I had wiped out the opposition under the ...
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS—It’s good to be in Texas. To a European like me, Texas is why we came to America. It’s a huge state, but more important, it’s a state of mind. It is a fount of freedom and imagination. For most of the inhabitants of America’s two coasts, Texas is worse than flyover ...
NEW YORK—At an outdoor luncheon party in Sussex celebrating Willy Shawcross’s birthday some years ago, I asked his then 95-year-old father whom did he find the most interesting man at Nuremberg. “Goring,” was the monosyllabic reply. “I mean from both sides,” I said. “Goring,” ...
NEW YORK—One felt the backlash against the BNP–BBC fiasco all the way to the Big Bagel, with local papers commenting on the lynching of Nick Griffin by rent-a-crowd minorities. Even people who think England is in Canada heard about it and called the freak show unfair and stage-managed, ...
